


Baby, You Can Ride My Car

by roachpatrol



Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-03-24
Updated: 2011-03-24
Packaged: 2017-10-17 06:11:27
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,319
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/173769
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/roachpatrol/pseuds/roachpatrol
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A quick and fluffy fill for the best_enemies anon meme:</p><p>Yana never discovers his true identity and takes Ten up on his predictable offer to see the stars -- and is mortally wounded and regenerates without recovering his memories. The Doctor works out very quickly who he must be, but doesn't want to tell and lose what they have.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Baby, You Can Ride My Car

**Author's Note:**

> For the purpose of this fic Martha and Jack are off doing Important Torchwood Things.

  
His new body is so alive. It doesn't want to slow down, doesn't want to sit around, doesn't want to ever, ever stop. Why should it? Why should he? There's so much to _do_. He's been an entirely different person for a whole half-morning now and it's been the best three hours of his life.

"Come on," he tells the Doctor. "Come on, come on, you promised you'd show me Earth! New Earth was rubbish and also look how it turned out, I got shot. I want regular Earth."

"Stay still and eat your breakfast," the Doctor says, passing him syrup for his waffles. "Black or green tea?"

"Stuff your tea," Yana decides, and wriggles in his chair. He's being rude, he knows, and it's very exciting. "I want milk. And some juice. Orange juice. And strawberry milk."

"You're going to get a heartsattack, at this rate," the Doctor mutters, going to rummage in the fridge.

"Hearts?" Yana asks.

The Doctor goes very still, his head still stuck in the fridge. "You've got two, now," he says carefully.

"Huh." Yana pours syrup all over his waffles, and then into the teapot just to be contrary. "I grew another?"

"Yep," the Doctor says, popping the p and backing out of the fridge with his arms full of cartons. "It's been known to happen."

"Explains the noise in my head, I suppose," Yana muses. "But not why you didn't tell me when I first woke up."

"What, 'Hello there, Yana, you're not dead and you've got two hearts, turns out you're an alien?' That would've gone over well, you were already freaking out--"

"I'm not an alien though, am I?" Yana steals the carton of strawberry milk out of the Doctor's hands, and slurps it. " _You've_ got two hearts, don't you? You got two people with the same physiology, you've got yourself a baseline standard, not _aliens_."

The Doctor smiles at him, that sad, pained gorgeous smile that makes Yana's heart-- both his hearts, apparently-- skip a beat.

"Alright," he says. "You're not an alien."

Yana's known him for a month now, this gangling chatterbox of a man, a mystery in an enigma in a pinstripe suit, and he's fairly sure he's been besotted with him every day of it-- though with this new body of his, _besotted_ seems to have gotten a bit of an upgrade into _madly, outrageously, ridiculously in lust_.

Lust is a feeling that he had hitherto only vaguely remembered from his first adolescence, all those years ago, a muddled period of confusion and embarrassment and endless, gnawing resentment. It's hard to be a young man in a dying world: getting old had, in many ways, been a mercy. Being an old man in a young man's body is a great deal more pleasant. Yana curls his toes deliciously together under the table and contemplates pouring syrup on the Doctor. 

"Well, right, then," Yana says vaguely, and digs into his waffles.

The Doctor starts frying some soy bacon.

"Hey, so-- what am I, then?" Yana asks. "We _look_ human."

"We look like Time Lords," the Doctor says quietly.

Yana finishes the last bite of waffle, chews it thoughtfully. "You've said that before," he says. " _Time Lord._ Is that what I am? I don't remember lording over any time, you know, I would have thought that would be the sort of thing to stick with a person, Time Lording."

The Doctor looks faintly amused, and brings the pan of bacon over to the table.

"Tibet," he says, "on Earth-- marvelous place, Tibet, they do very good mountains, but anyway, in Tibet, there is a religious leader called the Dalai Lama. The position is traditionally filled by a human, and he doesn't last that long, a century at the outside. A few years after the death of the Lama, his followers take items that were important to him-- glasses, a cane, a pocketwatch, that sort of thing-- into the villages of the country and present them to babies that were born around the time the Lama died."

"And the baby grabs the watch and presto change-o?" Yana asks. "Is that why I'm so young, now? I'm the Dalai Lama? Are we going to Tibet?"

The Doctor shrugs, smiling. "You'd make a terrible Lama," he says. "They'd never get you to hold still."

Yana forks a slice of bacon on to his plate. "It's re-- reincarnation," he says. "The transference of souls, right? I remember researching it, back on Malcassairo, I thought that perhaps if all matter were wiped out in the final collapse of the universe we might nonetheless be able to send our minds onwards... through the darkness, and out the other side..."

"Well," the Doctor says, sitting back in his chair and fussing with the syrup jug. He gets so uncomfortable when Yana talks about his life's work, about those long and awful years. It would be insulting if it weren't so adorable.

"Is the rest of-- was I the only one like this, Doctor?" Yana asks. "Everyone else, were they like us? And we left them there?"

"No," the Doctor says instantly. "No, it was just you. I'm almost positive."

"Almost."

"Wellll. If I'm wrong, I've got a time machine, right? We'll go back, minute after we left. Rustle up the whole crew, have a party, the whole shebang. But I think it was just you."

Yana nods. Part of him wants to demand to go back right now, to test each and every one of his charges, and another part, the larger part, wants to leave them all there, frozen in time. The TARDIS is infinitely large but the Doctor isn't and neither is their time together. The selfish, joyous, human part of Yana simply does not want to share.

"If you're sure," he says, taking another slice of bacon, and waits for the Doctor's eager nod.

"Earth?" the Doctor asks him. 

Yana grins. "Earth," he says.

***

They go to a lovely little place with a white sand beach and clear blue waters and big, tall, bright glass buildings, so big you can't see the tops when you look up. The Doctor calls it Miami, in the 22nd century. There are palms all over the place with bright ribbons wound around their trunks, and dozens of different species of flowers, and birds flying about everywhere, gray and black and dusty green, and a petting zoo with knee-high deer and great big sleepy waist-high cats, and people wearing almost no clothes at all strolling about in the surf. Yana takes most of his clothes off too, and has to put some of them back on very fast when there are complaints.

"Baby steps," the Doctor says. "This isn't a nudist beach."

"I wasn't nudest," Yana grumbles, "I had my shirt on and everything. Hey, what's that?"

There are hot dogs and hamburgers and cotton candy, which isn't made from cotton but is in fact spun molten sugar and fairly non-toxic pink food coloring. There is popcorn to feed to pigeons, and paper bags to feed to dogs.

"It was an accident," the Doctor says.

"I'm fairly sure with a dental pattern like that your dog will have an intestinal system that can handle a bit of grease and cellulose," Yana says. "Can we get ice cream?"

"You're going to throw up," the Doctor says.

"You're both horrible people and I'm going to sue," the dog owner says, and carries the dog away.

"Ice cream," Yana says. "Come on, come-- chocolate! I've heard of chocolate! Hey, give me some money, I want to buy it myself!"

"Just don't feed any of it to dogs," the Doctor warns, rummaging in his pockets.

Yana tries out chocolate and finds it startlingly disappointing. He works his way through vanilla, caramel, and a rocket pop before settling on a mint sorbet with pistachios.

"That's disgusting," the Doctor says. "It's two entirely incompatible plants fighting it out in your mouth."

"Three," Yana says thoughtfully, reading the ingredient list, "if you count corn syrup."

***

In the evening they build a whole city of sandcastles, tall spires topped by spiral shells and interesting twigs. When the tide comes in too far the Professor draws a circle around the whole affair with a stick, and then shakes a fist at the oncoming surf.

"This city is protected," he shouts.

The waves lap over his feet, breaching the smooth line of the circle effortlessly and crumbling the nearest spires down into nothingness.

"It should have worked," he says ruefully, and scratches his chest with the stick. "Perhaps I got the equations wrong."

The Doctor watches the spires sink and there is something deadly in his eyes, some close kin to the dark gaze of men and women just before they stole out of the compound to join the sharp-toothed Future Kind.

When Professor Yana was Malcassairo's last, best hope, he had hundreds of charges to look after, thousands, all hanging on him, praying for deliverance. Now he just has the Doctor to take care of and it is easier, in some ways, though it doesn't feel any less important.

"Hey," he says, nudging the man with his shoulder. "Hey, Doctor, is that an alien invasion?"

"What?" the Doctor asks, looking up. "What? Where?"

Yana pushes him over, into the midst of their city. All their work is ruined in an instant, and the waves wash seaweed into the Doctor's hair.

While the Doctor is still flailing around and sputtering Yana runs off along the beach, laughing, the spray foaming up around his knees like fireworks, red and gold in the sunset light. He's been a dying old man in a dying old universe for so long and now he's new, reborn, and he wants to romp along every inch of every galaxy the way he is running along this beach. The stars are coming out above him in a glory of light, an obscene wealth of heat and life and richness, and he wants to _scream_ with it. It's too much for any man to hold, this appreciation, this delight, and not go mad. The drums thunder in his ears, dance through his veins, a wild victory dance of primal joy.

"Long live living," he shouts up at the sky, breathless, "if living be this!"

The Doctor careens into him from behind and they go down together in a tangle of sandy limbs.

"Was that Shakespeare?" he asks, propping himself up on his elbows above Yana.

"Who?" Yana asks.

"Never mind," the Doctor says, and makes as if to get up. Yana hooks a hand behind his head and pulls him down, instead, into a long kiss. He might be too old, he might even be too young, but he remembers how to do this.

The Doctor tries to pull away for a moment, startled, and then relaxes fractionally into it, letting himself be persuaded in increments. He tastes of sugar and sea salt and burnt Time, of some indefinable Doctorishness, and Yana feels as if he only know how he would press himself up inside the Doctor's skin and stay there forever, the two of them one great, glorious creature...

Yana lets his hands come up to either side of the Doctor's head as he kisses him, running his thumbs lightly over the Doctor's temples. It feels like the shape of books in the dark, private worlds all locked up tight but if he could just get in-- he wants it, blindly, dumbly, a foreign animal hunger.

"Let me in," he whispers, tapping his fingers against the Doctor's skin to the rhythm of their heartsbeat, to the drums in his head. "Let me in, let me in, let me--"

The Doctor shakes his hands off and slides down Yana's body, his own hands already busy with Yana's sea-soaked trousers.

"How about," the Doctor says, licking along his stomach, "how about I introduce you to our respiratory bypass system?"

"Our what?" Yana asks. Then: "Oh! _Oh yes please._ "

***

Some time later, when the sky is dark and full of light, full of the moon and the gorgeous flickering trails of Humanity's home-made satellites, space stations and aeronautics and ballistic travel-pods and personal pleasure crafts, helicopters and airplanes and air balloons and dirigibles,Yana and the Doctor crash a beach wedding and the Doctor begins systematically introducing him to the local alcoholic beverages. Yana's experience with alcohol up to this point has been Utopia's finest repurposed rocket fuel, cut with sugar to taste, and so what the humans in the 22nd century drink for fun comes as something of a pleasant shock.

They work their way through Margaritas, Bloody Marys, Sex On The Beaches-- nothing like actual sex on the actual beach, but tastier-- a thing with bananas and gin called a World War Three, before settling down in front of a tiki lamp to let their trousers dry out and to give serious consideration to a series of pineapple cocktails, which come with big red flowers and little adorable purple umbrellas. Yana starts a collection of umbrellas in the Doctor's wild, salt-spiked hair.

"The Lamas," Yana says, after his sixth cocktail. "Do they train the baby Lamas up to be just like the old ones?"

The Doctor looks over at him. If he's surprised or confused, he doesn't show it.

"Yeah, sure," he says. With immense concentration, he sticks a ninth umbrella in his hair. "They're supposed to be the same person, after all."

Yana finishes his drink, and steals the Doctor's. "It's a good thing I'm just me," he says. "Whoever I am."

He sticks the flower from the drink behind his ear, and grabs the Doctor's hand. "Come on, Doctor, let's dance."

The Doctor lets himself be pulled on to the floor, shedding umbrellas as he goes. And if his eyes are dark, as they look down at him, they're also full of stars.  



End file.
